Or: 60 per cent off Distinctly Home bake ware, regularly $14.99 to $49.99, now just $5.99 to $19.99.

That’s a lot of nines.

Stated another way: that’s a load of pennies, which, come Monday, will no longer be distributed by the Royal Canadian Mint, the latest nail in the coffin of the copper, whose demise was first announced in last year’s federal budget.

Are you ready?

Of course you are not.

Home Depot Canada announced Friday that it had conducted a spot of research and 88 per cent of those surveyed are unawares that the “negative seigniorage” penny — a regal way of saying the copper is in the red — is officially out of circulation as of Feb. 4.

Yes, you can still use the pennies you have.

But when you go to purchase that two-by-four, you may be surprised to find your purchase magically rounded down to the nearest nickel.

(The government has set “rounding guidelines” — including a graph, should you care to check it out on the Mint’s website. Complex it is not. $1.08 and $1.09 round up to $1.10. $1.06 or $1.07 round down to $1.05.

Retailers are being encouraged to start their rounding as of now. Some are ready. Many are not. Some are seizing this as an exercise in positive public relations: Home Depot says it will be rounding down all purchases to the nearest nickel. And so $1.09 becomes $1.05, not $1.10.

So, what does this mean for the psyche of the shopper?

Are we upending more than 130 years of retail psychology?

Is this the end of the lure of .99 ?

How will we ever define “price appeal” in the future?

There is an illusion that has been embedded in the mind of the consumer since, oh, about 1880 hat an item priced at $9.99 is a far better deal than one priced at 10 bucks.

Robert Schindler, a professor at the school of business at Rutgers University, sends along a copy of a Macy’s newspaper advertisement from that year in which silks and satins were being promoted to the buying public at 99 cents, $1.49 and $1.99.

In 1894, James Eaton and Co. took out a full-page ad in this newspaper extolling, among other items, fancy check men’s suits “in shades of gray and fawn cheviots with silk threads running through.” The James Eaton price of $9.99 fit neatly the “Always the Cheapest,” brand line for the store that, for a time, tried to compete with brother Timothy’s growing empire.

But was it? Always the cheapest, that is?

And if not, why do shoppers fall for it?

Schindler has been studying the low-price signal for more than 30 years. Or, as he phrases it, “I started nine endings back in 1979.”

What surprised him first was the paucity of research. “A lot of people thought it was obvious . . . They would say, ‘Oh, businesses have this all figured out. They’ve done their tests and they know this works,’ ” Schindler says. “I talked to people in business and asked, ‘Why do you do it? Do you know how it works?’ ”

His conclusion: “They had no idea.”

Why they started doing it is equally vague.

There’s one theory, oft repeated, that a penny-wise U.S. merchant introduced odd-number price endings to his merchandise in order to compel thieving sales clerks to open the till.

In this scenario, the clerk could simply pocket the $1 charge for, say, an umbrella. If that umbrella were priced at 99 cents, the clerk would have to open the till to extract the penny change.

Schindler doesn’t buy it, placing the tale in the category of urban myth.

Combing through 19th-century New York Times advertisements, he discovered that nine endings were much more present in the ads where there were additional word “cues” — value, lowest, etc. — suggesting low price. Schindler found that “Right from 1880, retailers used nine endings for the purpose of helping communicate low price.”

High-priced goods carried different quality cues, and rounded price endings, leaving the clerk in the thieving scenario in a position to pocket the price of a fine cashmere sweater but not the proceeds from a value-priced pair of galoshes. Schindler sees no logic in, and can find no evidence of, what he deems to be merely a “cute” story.

Yet why a nine price ending would confer value in the minds of shoppers is as clear as mud.

In the world of academia this area of research is known as “just-below pricing.”

Here’s an interesting study.

Show a group of people two items, one priced at $20 and another at $25. Then re-price those items to $19.99 and $24.99. Conclusion: the $19.99 item is deemed much less expensive relative to $24.99 than the $20 item relative to $25.

“In another version we had them copy the prices onto a sheet of paper,” says Schindler. “We expected that in the earlier experiment, when we just showed them the price, it was because they’re not seeing the 99 endings. So the effect should go away if we made them write them down.”

The effect did not go away.

On the contrary, the study group, when asked to respond to the two sets of prices on a five-point scale, still judged the price differential between $19.99 and $24.99 to be larger than $20 versus $25.

“We still don’t completely understand that,” Schindler says. Were the subjects working on an impression that did not take the true value into account?

Some researchers have theorized that the pre-eminent consideration isn’t the 99 but rather the left-most digit. This so-called anchoring effect suggests that 99 is only fully seen as “low price” when the price comparison results in a change to that left-most digit, as in the $19.99 to $24.99 example. “But that’s not giving full consideration to the nines,” says Schindler, who after all has made this his life’s work (the nine-ending phenomenon can be explored in his recently released Pricing Strategies: A Marketing Approach.)

What Schindler can assert is that the perception that a 99 ending equates to value may very well be wrong. He conducted a study based on a market basket of items in which he found that while those with a 99-ending price gave consumers the perception of value, those items often carried higher prices when a comparison of six stores was conducted. The same finding was replicated in a study of the pricing of general merchandise.

Schindler calls this the “99-meaning paradox.”

Consumers may find this eye-opening.

Perhaps the answer as to why shoppers fall for the lure of 99 lies more in emotion than cognition.

And perhaps Canadian consumers will be possessed of a sense of nostalgia this weekend.

Let’s not go too far. Other countries that have bid farewell to the penny have not bid farewell to nine-ending advertising. Schindler cites Australia as an example. “Tell your readers not to expect a big change in price advertising just because the pennies are gone,” he says, adding that his own country is lagging. “We haven’t even gone metric.”

Meanwhile, the Bay has many pairs of women’s boots on sale with 99 cent endings. Perhaps it will be ever thus. The store’s communications department says the company is still evaluating how best to fully integrate the change. Rounding will be automated at point of sale. Unlike Home Depot, however, the penny-wise company says transactions will be rounded down or up to the nearest five-cent increment. $1.09 is $1.10, not $1.05.

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